Common Sense School Reform, by Frederick M. Hess (Palgrave
Macmillan). Common sense suggests that educators, like everyone else,
are more effective when given the flexibility to innovate and held
accountable for their performance. Unfortunately, as our own executive
editor Frederick Hess demonstrates, common sense is a tool rarely used
in school reform. Much of what passes for "reform" protects a
status quo in which success is seldom rewarded and failures go
unpunished.

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Hess uses examples from within education and beyond to suggest new
approaches to issues as diverse as school choice, teacher compensation,
and the use of technology. His recommendations represent a comprehensive
reform agenda that policymakers would be ill-advised to ignore.

The War Against Excellence: The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in
America's Middle Schools, by Cheri Pierson Yecke (Praeger). Yecke,
Minnesota's embattled education commissioner, targets two trends:
the "middle-school movement" and public education's
growing hostility toward the needs of gifted youngsters.

Both trends began as well-meaning impulses. The middle-school
movement sought to place adolescents in environments that would be
sensitive to their developmental needs and, in contrast to traditional
junior high schools, would focus on "teaching the child, not the
subject." The neglect of giftedness arose from the belief that any
extra resources should be devoted to kids who are falling behind in
school.

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As with so many good intentions, however, these went badly awry.
They turned into a profound anti-intellectualism that surely underlies
both the decline in student achievement after 4th grade and our spotty
record in nurturing tomorrow's leaders.

Mayors in the Middle: Politics, Race, and Mayoral Control of Urban
Schools, edited by Jeffrey Henig and Wilbur Rich (Princeton). A
provocative collection of case studies on the consequences of increased
mayoral control over the schools, featuring studies of Baltimore,
Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The cases are
somewhat uneven. Some, like the studies of D.C. and Boston, illuminate
the politics and practice of mayoral control, but the volume as a whole
doesn't set out to make the case for or against mayoral control. On
balance the book is a useful and measured contribution to a complicated
question.

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The New Accountability: High Schools and High-Stakes Testing,
edited by Martin Carnoy, Richard Elmore, and Leslie Santee Siskin
(RoutledgeFalmer). States are increasingly requiring students to pass an
exam in order to graduate from high school. This volume includes a
series of thoughtful chapters on the practice of this "new
accountability." The central argument is that "accountability
systems work--when they work--by calling forth energy, motivation,
commitment, knowledge, and skill" from educators. Accountability
cannot compel schools to improve, the editors argue, but it can
complement more traditional reforms. They call for greater attention to
capacity-building, professional development, and curriculum. Sensible
warnings, but delivered with the depressing and potentially misguided
subtext that policy can do no more than provide tools in the hope that
educators will utilize them.

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Political Education: National Policy Comes of Age, by Christopher
T. Cross (Teachers College). Veteran Washington education operative
Christopher Cross chronicles the making of federal education policy from
the Truman administration to the present. Cross adeptly covers the
creation of the federal Department of Education and provides perceptive
and fair mini-portraits of the tenures of several secretaries of
education. The book's shortcomings are its que sera, sera view of
the current state of federal education policy and its unimaginative
musings on the future. But readers will come away with enhanced
understanding of what got us where we are today.